Dyson’s got a $500 air-powered curling iron

Moving air — that’s the through line across most of Dyson’s products. The vacuums, fans, hand dryers, hair driers — at their heart, they all the do the same thing. Same goes for the new Dyson Airwrap, which has figured out a way to leverage vacuum power into hair curling.

Here’s how Dyson describes it,

At the heart of this story comes a radical idea: harness Dyson’s digital motor to create a phenomenon known as the Coanda effect. The Coanda effect occurs when a high-speed jet of air flows across a surface and, due to differences in pressure, the air flow attaches itself to the surface. Taking advantage of this principle, Dyson’s team of aerodynamicists created a way to style hair using only air combined with heat.

That’s engineering talk for a device that shoots air through a half dozen holes, wrapping hair around the cylinder. Then, like a standard curling iron, it uses heat like a standard curling iron — though this one is much less hot than cheaper models, potentially saving your hair (and skin) in the process.

All of which is to say it’s not this:

Dyson says it spent six years researching/testing the product, which seems to be on-par with the company’s high engineering standards. No surprise then that the Airwrap isn’t cheap. The kit starts at $500, with the “complete” version running $550 for multiple hair types.